When most people think back on the classic arcade games of the early 1980s we hear a lot about Donkey Kong and Frogger, but few seem to mention Taito's Elevator Action, an action game that tasked players with descending through an armed skyscraper filled with armed guards and eponymous elevators.  The game led to a sequel here and a compilation re-release there, but the property has remained dormant for several years now.  There have been attempts to bring it back though.  Consider this tale over at Boing Boing in which a 2008 pitch for a Nintendo DS Elevator Action relaunch is discussed.  Take special note of the character artwork for the new Elevator protagonists as created by artist James Harvey (better known as Harvey James).

A quick getaway to Japan that was meant to be for pleasure only, Harvey explains, turned into "a pretty fruitful business trip" when a friend happened to have an upcoming meeting with a Taito representative: one in charge of the secret project to bring Elevator Action back to life for Nintendo's handheld.

The friend, says Harvey, "solicited some character designs as part of his proposal for the game... The brief he gave me was to redesign the main characters, three gung-ho anti-terrorists, but to 'keep one eye on the present and one eye on the past', which is one of the more exciting briefs I've ever had. At the time, the economic proliferation of China was making big headlines, so I looked to things like modern Chinese couture and street fashion to get inspiration for my designs, as well as North Korean military uniforms and hip-hop culture."

Quite obviously the clear charmer of the three, North Korean team member Kim Min Ji uses a (curiously familiar) laser pistol that Harvey explains "charges from a tea kettle full of battery acid, which she can also hit people with."

Taito passed on the pitch, so we'll never see these characters prowling through buildings and shooting at guards, but I have to admit that while the male characters seen in the article seem genre generic, I like the girl.  Maybe it's her Zapper weapon or maybe it's her big pink M. Bison-like hat, but something about her tells me that she has personality.  Losing her to the circular file of development hell is a shame, as I really think that she could have been fun to follow on an adventure.  So what if her acid weapon makes her an extremist psychopath?